What do you get if you take an architecture for creating componentized applications that works across departments, companies and infrastructure vendors, and strip it from open interfaces and force customers to buy only your components?

Microsoft claims that you get an easy to deploy service oriented architecture. But it's more like buying a car that can only drive on Microsoft's toll roads and that has to be loaded onto a flatbed truck to be transported between those closed toll roads.

Welcome to the world of the Redmond diet. Just like the perceived benefits of Atkin's and other hype-of-the-day the totally illogical is spun into offering great benefits.

31 Oct 2007

The facts: Microsoft today released "Oslo" and opened the flood gates of PR spin: Oslo is an "effort [that] utilizes the company's top engineering talent to build on the model-driven and service-enabled principles of Microsoft Dynamic IT and extend the benefits of service-oriented architecture (SOA) beyond the firewall."

We could go on quoting the press release, but you would get none the wiser. The "effort" that is Oslo is limited to minor enhancements in future versions of Microsoft middleware portfolio. Companies that have been completely sucked into the Microsoft sales machine will be able to use it to share componentized applications.

Most companie today live in the 21st century and therefore will want to work with partners, do mergers and buy technology based on its merits. Those will want to build a SOA that actually delivers on the promise of being open standards based. Somebody in Redmond must have forgotten to take their reality medication.